I’ve been excited to see the recent proliferation of horror/dark/weird fiction magazines and anthologies appearing everywhere. When I started writing in earnest in 2008 (crap, is it that long ago…?) horror markets were either rare, subsumed into fantasy, or just poor quality. I admit I was still green when it came to submitting stories, and there were certainly the likes of Black Static just kicking off, along with a few others.

Now there are many new ventures setting sail across the wide wide internet, and many of them are high profile. Weird fiction is becoming a byword for literary, experimental horror/fantasy (although that is a rather generalised definition of it) and at the time of writing you still have 11 hours left to contribute to the Indiegogo fundraiser for The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, edited by Laird Barron and published by Michael Kelly’s Undertow Books. An anthology I can’t wait to get my hands on. Undertow is also responsible for the rather excellent Shadows and Tall Trees – a classy journal of literary horror containing many writers in common with Black Static, but having its own unique aesthetic and sensibilities. From next year it is changing to a yearly trade paperback, hopefully with more stories (and I must get my arse in gear and submit something).

Other zines I’ve been noticing gaining in profile are John Joseph Adams’ Nightmare Magazine. From the stable that produces Lightspeed, it contains a mixture of new and reprinted horror stories and has a nicely eclectic range of fiction.

Lamplight is a smaller, perhaps lesser-known, zine that has been going for over a year now, but is publishing some interesting names and is building a following.

Launching this autumn is The Dark, published by Jack Fisher, and the first issue contains some very impressive names. I’m glad to see they are seeking more interesting, experimental unique fiction, but still on the darker side of things.

Horror fiction went through a particular period in the 80s when it was so fashionable, with its lurid black and red book covers. And the the bottom fell out of it thanks to the market becoming over-saturated. Now there appears to be a new fashion with genre fiction and perhaps publishers are still a little reticent to call it horror. Hard to shake the negative connotations that the 80s plastered over that word. In its place has come this intelligent, literary fiction of the weird and the dark, and the horrific. It seems to be rising again, and I for one am dedicated to following this particular fashion.

Today is World Book Day and I’ve been thinking what exactly it is about books – physical, tactile books with pages and binding and weight – that excited me so much as a kid and still does. And also, why that matters and my mixed emotions over digital publishing.

I’ve always been a part-time Luddite, resisting new technology at the same time as coveting it, but by the time I inevitably give in and buy the gadget the rest of the world has moved on. As a writer in the modern world it is impossible not to adopt the use of some technology. Even Joe Hill, who apparently still enjoys the use of a typewriter, is a regular user of Twitter. Yet, I still haven’t bought into using an e-reader of some kind, despite their now huge popularity, even though I agree with the whole saving of space and trees aspect. Something about them still turns me off, and I know I am in the minority these days and given enough time, late night whisky and itchy mouse fingers I may purchase a Kindle and be all born-again digital Messiah. By which point the rest of the world will be consuming their books via Google Glass or direct brain uploads.

The thing is, when I walk into a bookshop, or a library, like the one in the photo above (Barter Books in Alnwick) it’s the very existence of the books that thrills me. Yes, the smell, the feel etc… but also the fact that they exist. When I was four years old I used to sleep in a sectioned-off area of my mum’s bedroom (because we used to rent out the only other bedroom in the flat) that had a wall on the left and a bookshelf on the right. I still have that same bookshelf (shelves bowing and blistering with multiple paint jobs), which towered over me as a child, all six shelves of it, laden with Enid Blyton and Dr Seuss and various books that have now escaped my memory. There was a safety to them. They represented, to me, a literal barrier to the nightmares that would try and invade my sleep.

Whether it’s due to the presence of that bookcase, I don’t know, but I find physical books to be such a valuable commodity. Anyone can pick them up and read them at any time, and given even minimal protection from the elements they should survive an extremely long time. There’s a reverence inherent in people’s behaviour towards large collections of books. Hushed words and soft footsteps, and I understand that. Who wouldn’t be reverent to the time, effort and imagination that has gone into producing those words, or even just the cover artwork design.

I’m not advocating that this is how everyone should behave, and I foresee a time in the very near future when attitudes are going to change irrevocably. The advent of digital publishing has turned books into more of a throwaway commodity. A non-corporeal thing that is gone at the touch of a button (the same could be said for books at the strike of a match, yet somehow one is seen as much more iconoclastic than the other). There are people growing up now who know nothing else but a digital world, and I’m curious to be able to see through their eyes and have a sense of how they perceive books. I don’t believe for a second that this applies to all people half my age or younger, but there has to be a difference of perception there. When I was sleeping in that bed betwixt wall and bookcase, the only technology in our house was perhaps a pocket calculator. TV, radio, fridge, telephones were still operating on technology that hadn’t progressed much since before WWII. I saw the advent of personal computers from their most basic incarnations (ZX spectrum etc…), but I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to grow up in a world where the internet and mobile phones, tablets, PCs, game consoles are an everyday occurrence and taken for granted.

One of my worries is that many things in today’s society are becoming so ephemeral, gadgets replaced by the next gadget within days of release, downloads zipping back and forth, our lives played out on screens, in social media, in virtual existence. Books need to survive as a concrete collection of our gathered wisdom, folly, insecurities, successes, loves, hates and philosophies. They need to stand as a safety barrier holding back the tide of invisible information.

This is fast becoming a sermon, and I don’t intend it to be so. It is a fairly unstructured thought salad, but I felt the need to blog about it (and yes I see the irony inherent after what I’ve just been saying). Perhaps it comes down to the effects of age and hankering after an age when life seemed simpler and less cluttered with ‘noise’. I’m sure many of us go through similar feelings as we get older, quietly terrified of the new world crashing down on us like a wave and everything we valued and treasured being swept away in the tide.

If there’s anything I’ve learned about writing over the last few years, in particular relation to my own behaviour, it’s that I work best with momentum, but like any engine I start with difficulty when cold. And the longer you leave me to gather dust clogging up my spark plugs (just let me run with the tired metaphor, apparently ‘tired metaphor’ is a search phrase that brought a visitor to my blog so I don’t want to disappoint the fans…) then the harder it is to get me going again.

I hadn’t completed a first draft of a story since some time last autumn, I believe. I have written since then – two unfinished first drafts that were quite painful. And an awful lot of avoidance and self-doubt. Last night I finally completed a first draft of a new story, and I’m already 500 words into a new one, which I might actually be enjoying! Stranger things have happened.

This momentum feels good. It creates its own pathways. Ideas form and evolve and the act of sitting down and writing begins to feel like something that I look forward to doing, instead of the monolithic escarpment needing scaled it had become.

So the new short story is a nice light-hearted story of two young heroin addicts and the depths their exploration into themselves reach. Okay, it’s a depressing tale with some unpleasant body horror and drug use and why the hell does my mind take me down these weird avenues? Current title is ‘Love as Deep as Bones’, which I’m quite liking and may well stick.

Next story is something utterly different and a little tester for the fantasy novel idea about Scottish Drovers that’s been rattling around my head for over a year now. This short story is mainly an exercise in voice and how to pare down the plot of the novel to its skeletal basics and tell it in the style of a Scottish Traveller tale, with its everyman protagonist in a battle of wits with the Devil. Thanks to Duncan Williamson’s excellent little collection of Scottish Traveller’s tales – “Jack and the Devil’s Purse” from Birlinn, which has inspired the voice and mode of storytelling.

Keeping the momentum going is always the challenge. My ability to focus on work seems to be worse than ever, but it’s all positive currently and I’ll continue blogging as I roll forward.